Hillary Clinton co-founded the Senate India Caucus, which anti-offshoring advocates say champions “issues important to India, including outsourcing and H-1B and L-1 visas.”

Clinton in 2005: “I am delighted to be the Senator from Punjab as well as from New York.”

Clinton has called for nearly doubling the controversial H-1B guest worker program—suggesting that American workers lack the skills to fill American jobs. She has also defended the cheap labor practices of an Indian outsourcing firm, to which the Clinton Foundation has financial ties: “We are not against all outsourcing; we are not in favor of putting up fences,” she said.

Shortly after the CEO of HCL—the Indian firm that helped lay off 250 American Disney workers in Orlando— called American tech graduates “unemployable”, Bill Clinton delivered a speech to HCL to the tune of nearly a quarter of a million dollars at Disney World in Orlando.

Reports note that Clinton has repeatedly “telegraphed” her support for a globalized world to the Indian community. At a conference of 14,000 Indian Americans, Bill Clinton extolled the virtues of “open borders, easy travel, easy immigration”.

In 2007, Barack Obama slammed “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)’s personal, financial and political ties to India… It’s all about the money,” his campaign wrote.

The destruction, the annihilation, the conspiracy to destroy the middle class is real. The murder of the middle class is not a theory. It’s not an opinion. It’s not a figgment of my imagination. It’s a proven fact. Three studies were published backing up what I’m saying. Sometimes, timing isn’t important—it’s everything.

(…)

Pew’s figures reveal a steady erosion of America’s middle class.

The steepest declines were seen in industrial towns. It is no coincidence that these job and income losses came from the predominantly white working and middle class. But the trend isn’t just seen in the Midwest or among working class, blue-collar whites. The same trend and the same declines can be found among college-educated white-collar Americans. Pew Research found that even in areas of high-tech reinvention such as Austin, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina, incomes are falling and the middle class is shrinking.

Pew found that even in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, where over six hundred thousand new residents have arrived since 2000, heavily weighted toward college degrees, median household income (adjusted for inflation) fell from $83,000 in 1999 to under $76,000 in 2014.

This clearly shows the murder of the middle class. The rich are getting richer, while the poor are taken care of by the government and paid for by middle-class taxpayers. The savaged middle class is being taxed and regulated so heavily to pay for the poor that eventually there will be no more middle-class jobs, no more middle-class families. Our incomes are down, our jobs are disappearing, our bills are escalating, our health care costs are exploding (thanks to Obamacare), and our taxes are dramatically higher. For America’s middle class, this is a disaster of epic proportions.

So now you know why we’re angry. We have every reason to be angry. We’ve been targeted for extinction.

When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.

Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.

We don’t need to rely on complex statistical calculations to see the harm being done to some workers. Simply look at how employers have reacted. A decade ago, Crider Inc., a chicken processing plant in Georgia, was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend. Shortly after, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages. Similarly, the flood of recent news reports on abuse of the H-1B visa program shows that firms will quickly dismiss their current tech workforce when they find cheaper immigrant workers.

Immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer.

But that’s only one side of the story. Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated.

When we look at the overall value of immigration, there’s one more complicating factor: Immigrants receive government assistance at higher rates than natives. The higher cost of all the services provided to immigrants and the lower taxes they pay (because they have lower earnings) inevitably implies that on a year-to-year basis immigration creates a fiscal hole of at least $50 billion—a burden that falls on the native population.

What does it all add up to? The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus, so it’s not too farfetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all. Instead, it has changed how the pie is split, with the losers—the workers who compete with immigrants, many of those being low-skilled Americans—sending a roughly $500 billion check annually to the winners. Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program.

Americans are tired of an economic elite that ignores them. Americans know the game is rigged against them. For generations Americans could make their way from the bottom to the top of the heap by starting businesses. In some periods more of them succeeded than others, but everyone knew someone who got rich more or less honestly. That came to a crashing end during the Obama Administration. There were fewer small firms with fewer workers in 2013 than there were in 2007.

ENTERPRISE EMPLOYMENT SIZE

NUMBER OF FIRMS

NUMBER OF ESTABLISHMENTS

EMPLOYMENT

02: 0-4

-129,985

-130,063

-212,803

03: 5-9

-67,969

-69,904

-451,075

04: 10-19

-44,291

-48,177

-598,105

05: <20

-242,245

-248,144

-1,261,983

06: 20-99

-29,358

-38,422

-1,225,253

07: 100-499

-3,322

4,737

-556,311

08: <500

-274,925

-281,829

-3,043,547

09: 500+

325

65,164

705,535

The deplorables look at the American economy as a lottery. They aren’t sophisticated, but they’re sly: They know the game is rigged, because there aren’t any winners. The American economy is more corrupt and more cartelized then at any time in its history. Productivity growth was negative for the past two quarters, and five-year productivity growth is the lowest since the stagflation of the 1970s.

Corporations are making money by gaming the regulatory system rather than deploying new technologies. Close to half of the increase in corporate profits during the past decade can be attributed to regulatory rent-seeking by large corporations, according to a June 2016 study by Boston University economist Jim Bessen. Bessen concluded that “investments in conventional capital assets and R&D account for a substantial part of the rise in valuations and profits especially during the 1990s. However, since 2000, political activity and regulation account for a surprisingly large share of the increase.”